Tuesday, 4 August 2009

This is probably very old news to some, but I'm a bit behind in blogging.

Yet another really cool product my former colleagues at OFAI have been working on over the last years: integration of content-based playlist generation technologies into the most awesome music hardware out there.

If you can't read German, the perhaps most interest bits: retail price per unit €4.765, 500 pre-orders before the device was available, OFAI and B&O will continue the collaboration, size of the features representing each song: 3.2KB.

My former colleagues at OFAI have been experimenting with audio content based music recommendation for FM4 Soundpark for a while now. (I blogged about it here.) Now they (and in particular Martin Gasser) have taken it a few steps further and implemented a 3D exploration interface using the islands of music metaphor.

It's all in Java and requires special privileges because it needs access to low level graphics card functions. But if you get passed those hurdles here's what you'd see:

(Navigation: space bar, A,W,S,D and mouse)

There is more information about this and other recommendation tools they have developed for Soundpark here (in German).